Gray Salvation (16 page)

As if to compound their misery, the rain had intensified, huge drops making the puddles dance like a Las Vegas showpiece.

‘How far to the border?’ Sonny asked.

‘Too far for Andrew to walk,’ Doc said, taking stock of Harvey’s injuries.

‘Agreed,’ Smart added. ‘If we’re gonna get out of here, we need transport.’

‘We could just get on the sat phone and call for help,’ Howard pointed out.

‘Aren’t we forgetting something?’ Gray asked, drawing blank stares from his colleagues. ‘Mac risked his life getting us in. We can’t just abandon him. And if I call it in now, we’ll be ordered home.’

‘To be fair,’ said Howard, ‘we all knew the risks when we signed up, Mac included. Don’t forget we’ve still got an armoured unit on our tails.’

Gray didn’t entirely agree with Mark Howard’s assessment of the situation. ‘Sure, we knew the risks, but we never said anything about leaving men behind.’ He took out his phone and bent over it as he studied the map, trying his best to keep the rain off the screen. ‘According to this, there’s only one road between Mac’s lay-up point and Dubrany. The GPS says it’s two hundred yards to our right. My guess is they’ll bring him in that way.’

‘If they come by road,’ Howard argued. ‘Intel was wrong about the BMPs, so who’s to say they haven’t got choppers, too?’

‘We’d have heard them by now,’ Smart said. ‘The road’s the only logical choice.’

Gray did a quick mental calculation. ‘Mac radioed in ten minutes ago, and we’re about three miles from his last known location. Adding in time to secure him and call it in, I’m pretty sure they haven’t come through here yet.’ He checked his watch. ‘I reckon we’ve got ten minutes at the most. We need a plan.’

‘We can expect company from Dubrany, too,’ Sonny said. ‘I suggest we stall them somehow.’

‘Those BMPs will take a lot of stopping,’ Smart pointed out, ‘and we’re down to a few rounds each.’

‘Plus we don’t know what they’ll be transporting Mac in,’ said Howard. ‘Could be a Land Rover or another light infantry vehicle.’

Gray had to concede that it didn’t look good, but then no combat situation ever did. Despite this, he wasn’t about to give up. There had to be a way of halting the vehicle carrying their pilot while stopping the Russians from Dubrany crashing the party.

‘Could we block the road with a couple of trees?’ Harvey asked from the back of the Land Rover, speaking slowly to articulate the words through his injured mouth.

‘Those BMPs are like mini tanks,’ Sonny said. ‘They’d roll over them like matchsticks.’

‘How about blowing a crater in the road? In this weather, it would soon fill with water and look like any other puddle.’

‘Aside from the noise that would make, BMPs are amphibious,’ Sonny told him. ‘We’d have more luck holding up a sign reading “Halt”.’

‘I think it’s a moot point,’ Gray said, as the sound of diesel engines invaded the night. He ran towards the road and crouched behind a tree, just in time to see the BMP-3 trundle past. It was obviously searching for them, and would soon meet up with the convoy transporting Mac to Dubrany. Behind it came the BTR-60 and another three armoured vehicles.

Gray waited until the vehicles had passed out of sight, then stood and rejoined the others.

‘Looks like we’ll have to come up with an alternative,’ he said, letting the others know what he’d seen. ‘There’s no way we’ll be able to stop six vehicles.’

‘If you were in their shoes, what would you expect us to do?’ Sonny asked.

‘Head for the nearest border,’ Gray said, and the others nodded in agreement. ‘They’ll probably send every spare man east to cut us off, while a small contingent forces us into the trap.’

‘They might think we’re a local Tagrilistani army unit and try to stop us getting back to our own lines,’ Doc suggested.

‘Not dressed this way,’ Smart said, ‘and the locals would see no value in rescuing Andrew. Tom’s right. They’d assume we’d head for the border.’

‘So the last thing they’d expect would be for us to head back into town,’ Sonny said, a cheeky grin stretching his face.

‘You want to go back to
Dubrany
?’ Howard asked, looking from man to man. ‘Are you crazy?’

Gray held up a hand. ‘Sonny has a valid point. They’ll be scouring the countryside for us, not the town.’

‘Okay, they might not being expecting us,’ Howard persisted, ‘but they’ll sure be on alert by now.’

‘For a team dressed in black,’ Gray countered. ‘We can take the uniforms from the first group we took down back in town. That means getting to the truck we hid, then driving it to the jail.’ Before Howard could protest, he added, ‘We’ll have their weapons and ammo, too.’

‘The place’ll be packed!’ Howard said. ‘Everyone’s gonna want a piece of Mac.’

‘Then we improvise,’ Sonny said, clearly determined to press ahead with the rescue effort.

Howard shook his head. ‘I’m used to firmer plans than “we’ll improvise”,’ he said. ‘It sounds like a suicide mission to me.’

‘Then you stay behind and take care of Andrew,’ Gray said. ‘We can’t take him in with us. We’ll find a place closer in for you both to lie up until we come back out. Doc speaks Russian, so we’ll need him with us.’

Howard seemed happier with that suggestion, and Gray told the team to set about fashioning a crude stretcher to carry Harvey. They did so with two sturdy tree branches and a waterproof coat they found in the back of the vehicle, then collected their weapons and started the long slog back towards Dubrany.

Chapter 23

26 January 2016

Sarah Thompson sat impatiently at the red light, silently pleading with it to change so that she could continue to the office. She considered blowing through it, certain she’d get away with the minor transgression at five in the morning and with no other cars in sight, but after checking her rear-view mirror and seeing a police car pull up behind her, she thought better of it.

Eventually she got the green light and pulled away quickly, though not so fast that she drew attention to herself. If the cops pulled her over she could easily explain her way out of any ticket, but she didn’t want the hassle. It would simply take up too much time, and she was desperate to get to Thames House to hear the latest news about the mission to rescue Andrew.

When she eventually pulled into the underground car park, she was glad to see Ellis’s Jaguar parked in the spot reserved for the director general. Thompson ran up the stairs and swiped her card at the office door. Inside she found the room in near darkness, the only light coming from Ellis’s glass palace. Thompson walked straight in, and her boss looked up from her laptop for a brief second before beckoning her over.

‘Any word?’ Thompson asked.

‘Nothing yet,’ Ellis said. ‘I was just looking over the satellite feed. It’s a few hours old, but it’s all we have.’

Due to the secrecy of the mission, they hadn’t been able to task the satellite to maintain a position over the conflict zone, instead relying on the few brief minutes when it passed overhead on its continuous orbit high above the planet.

‘How does it look?’

‘There’s a lot more activity than there was yesterday,’ Ellis told her. ‘Whatever Gray did, it appears to have stirred up a hornet’s nest.’

‘That doesn’t inspire confidence.’

‘Wherever Tom Gray goes, this kind of thing happens. We can only hope they’re already on their way out.’

Thompson leaned closer to get a better look. ‘Those look like tanks,’ she said, pointing to two shapes heading away from Dubrany. ‘I thought the Russians pulled them all back.’

‘It seems Gayle Cooper got that wrong. Or perhaps they were just well hidden.’

Thompson wondered what else they’d missed. Hopefully not much, because the odds of rescuing Andrew were slim enough as it was. The last thing they needed was more surprises, especially of the large and armoured variety.

‘Wait!’ she said, and Ellis paused her scrolling. ‘Go back.’

Ellis tracked the image back, and Thompson pointed to the cross in the corner of the screen.

‘That’s a helicopter.’

Ellis looked at the summary Cooper had given her. ‘According to this, the Russian forces never shipped any to Tagrilistan. It must be Gray’s.’

Thompson’s heart sank. She could see a few men standing around it – but if they were Gray’s team, they’d be climbing aboard and coming home. They wouldn’t be relaxing and taking in the view.

‘Something must be wrong,’ she said. ‘Why are they just hanging around?’

Ellis’s face told her they were in agreement. ‘Either there’s a problem with the helicopter, or that isn’t Gray down there. Whichever way you look at it, the mission appears to be over.’

‘But what about Andrew? We have to send someone else in.’

‘Gray was our last chance.’ Ellis pushed back from her laptop and rubbed her eyes wearily. ‘Sending him in was always a risk – if it turns out he’s failed, there’ll be questions to answer. News of the rescue attempt is sure to leak, not least from the Russians, and the PM will want to know my role in this. I’ll keep your name out of it, but as for Andrew, I’m afraid we’ve done all we can.’

Colonel Dmitri Aminev looked up as the door burst open, unhappy at the late arrival of the captain. He motioned for the man to sit at the table, making a mental note to have him disciplined once things returned to normal.

‘As I was
saying
,’ he growled, looking at the tardy officer, ‘there appear to be five of them. They took the Englishman and made off in a Land Rover. Their last known location is here.’ Aminev stabbed at the map with his pen, highlighting the place where the intruders had crashed through the chain-link fence to make their escape.

‘A Tagrilistani unit?’ the late officer asked.

‘Clearly not. If you had been here on time, you would know that we managed to capture their helicopter pilot. He’s British, which tells me that we’re facing Special Forces, probably SAS. They operate in small groups, and they hit hard and fast.’

‘With their air transportation compromised, they’ll be forced to drive to the border,’ a young lieutenant observed. ‘That means crossing the river, and there are only three bridges. If we can get men there first, we can stop them.’

Aminev liked the way the junior officer thought. There were two units in the area that could split up to hold the crossings while his main force drove the insurgents towards them.

‘Contact the commanders of these posts,’ Aminev said, pointing to the locations on the map, ‘and tell them to stop anyone who tries to cross the river.’

While an officer disappeared to relay the orders, Aminev gave instructions to gather the rest of the troops and get them mounted up. He had more than fifty vehicles under his command, enough to carry a large percentage of the five hundred men at his disposal. He decided to leave fifty behind and send the rest on the chase, with those who couldn’t fit into the vehicles following on foot, as they carefully swept the countryside.

‘Sir, don’t you want to leave more men behind?’ another officer asked. ‘What if the Tagrilistani army tries to recapture the town while we’re out searching for the British?’

Aminev dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand. ‘We’ve both been observing the ceasefire, so there is no reason for them to attack. Besides, our men will be travelling
away
from enemy lines, so they won’t even know we’re gone.’

In truth, the last thing he cared about was losing the town. He knew the war was almost over, and that by the end of the week the pro-Europe president would be gone, replaced by someone sympathetic to the Russian cause. How exactly that would be achieved, he didn’t know, but he’d learned about it at the same time that Andrew Harvey had been put under his control. Tasked with looking after the English prisoner, Aminev had demanded to know why the man couldn’t simply be shot in the head instead.

He was their bargaining chip, the Russian envoy had told him, to be kept alive until Moscow deemed him surplus to requirements. The penalty for failing to stick to the brief had been made all too clear, which was why Aminev was throwing almost everything he had at getting the prisoner back.

‘Will you be leading the search?’ asked the sharp young lieutenant.

‘No,’ Aminev said, rising from his seat. ‘I will interrogate the helicopter pilot when he arrives. I want to know exactly who we’re up against.’

Chapter 24

26 January 2016

Despite Ellis’s assertion that they’d done all they could, Sarah Thompson wasn’t about to let things lie. Apart from being her lover, Andrew Harvey was a damned fine operative, and to be cast aside by the government he served was unconscionable.

Thompson was sitting at her desk, the search for a replacement killer going nowhere. That didn’t surprise her, because she knew she wasn’t giving it her full attention. When she tried to concentrate, thoughts of Harvey kept jumping into her head, distracting her from the job in hand.

She rose and began pacing the room, trying to stem the anger boiling inside her. She couldn’t believe Ellis expected her to simply get on with her job when Andrew was facing certain death, but that was what she’d been told to do. Carry on and get the name of the person sent in to carry out the assassination.

Easy orders to give when it wasn’t your soulmate languishing in a filthy prison thousands of miles away.

Thompson glanced over at Ellis’s office and saw her boss on the phone. She stood, checked her watch and decided that her moment had arrived.

‘I’m going for lunch,’ she said to Elaine Solomon as she headed for the door, getting a sympathetic smile in return. It had been the same for the last couple of days – condolences for her imminent loss, lots of tiptoeing around her. None of them knew about the rescue attempt, and they were clearly under the impression that Harvey’s fate had already been sealed.

Not if she had anything to do with it.

Thompson rode the elevator down to the underground car park and climbed into her Ford, knowing that what she was about to do would probably mean kissing her job goodbye.

To her surprise, she found that she didn’t care.

Over the last year, only one thing had come to mean anything to her, and that was Andrew Harvey. If he died, there would be little of value left in her life. She certainly wouldn’t continue serving a government that had relinquished him so readily.

She drove out of the car park on autopilot, her mind concentrating on the upcoming encounter. She had to admit that she hadn’t thought it all through and had no idea how it would turn out, but the one thing she
did
know was that she couldn’t sit idle while Andrew’s time ran out.

She hardly registered the details of the drive, and before she became fully conscious of it, she found herself parked outside the Petrushkin, still uncertain as to what she would do once she got inside.

She decided to play it by ear.

As she got out of the car, a traffic warden approached her.

‘You’re parked on double yellows,’ he said, opening his pad to begin writing a ticket.

Thompson was conscious of the Russian thug standing watch outside the restaurant, and moved closer to the warden, her back to the building.

‘MI5,’ she whispered, flashing her temporary ID.

‘You’ll still have to shift it,’ the man said, noting down her licence plate, ‘otherwise it’ll be towed.’

Thompson leaned in closer, looking at the warden’s name badge. ‘Jeff,’ she said in a slightly harsher whisper, ‘if I come out and my car has moved one inch, I swear I will shoot you in the head. You can either call this in and report me, in which case the black-ops team I run will hunt you down and destroy you, or you can stop scribbling and walk away. I’m working a case, and if you blow my cover or cost me my transport, life for you will turn very shitty, very quickly.’

Thompson turned her body so that the Russian on the door could see her smiling at the traffic warden, hoping he saw it as an attempt to flirt her way out of a ticket. Of more concern was Jeff, who looked like he was about to soil himself.

Thompson leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek. ‘Last chance,’ she whispered, and was relieved to see him pocketing the ticket book as he walked away. She walked in the opposite direction, giving the bouncer her most dazzling smile as she pushed the restaurant door open.

As she’d expected, Bessonov sat inside, waiting for his regular meeting with Polushin. Two more of his thugs were sitting near the window, instantly alert to her presence. Behind the bar, a less imposing figure slowly polished an already clean glass.

Thompson strode to the rear of the room, where Bessonov was finishing off a bowl of borscht. The Russian watched her approach, offering the slightest glance to his henchmen as she neared the table.

‘Where’s Andrew Harvey?’ Thompson asked, standing across from the mobster with her hands on her hips. She both heard and felt the footsteps behind her but kept her gaze on Bessonov, who looked up at her impassively.

In the mirror above the corner booth, Thompson could see the two bodyguards getting closer. The one in front was at least a foot taller than she and had to weigh twice as much.

Perfect.

As a meaty hand clasped her on the shoulder, Thompson grabbed the wrist and took half a step backwards, arching her back and pulling down on the arm. Her opponent’s weight worked against him, and he flew over her shoulder and landed on his back with a thud. Thompson immediately dropped to her knees, one of them coming down on the man’s face with all of her weight behind it. She heard the satisfying crunch of broken cartilage but didn’t have time to savour the moment. Her hands were already inside the man’s jacket, and a second later she was standing with the bodyguard’s Makarov jammed in Bessonov’s windpipe.

‘Call off the dogs,’ she said evenly.

Bessonov remained calm, raising a hand to halt the advance of the second bodyguard, who already had his own pistol aimed at Thompson’s head.

‘I’m warning you, tell them to back off or this’ll be the shortest meeting you ever had.’

Bessonov carefully articulated a curt order, and his henchman stowed his weapon before helping his injured colleague to his feet. Thompson found herself on the receiving end of a fierce stare, but she wasn’t there to win friends and influence people.

She waited until the pair had retreated a sufficient distance, then turned her attention back to their boss.

‘Andrew Harvey. Where is he?’

‘Never heard of him.’

With lightning speed, Thompson struck the mobster across the face with the butt of the Makarov.

‘Remember him now?’ she asked, ramming the barrel back into the side of his neck.

‘You were warned to stop harassing me with these unfounded alleg—’

Thompson’s free hand came up in a flash, her fist catching Bessonov’s eyebrow with a glancing blow. The ring on her finger cut a gouge in his skin and blood immediately began seeping from the wound, but the mobster’s tone didn’t change.

‘As I said, I’ve never heard of this Andrew Harvey.’

Thompson was beginning to lose her cool. Short of shooting him, there appeared little she could do to get him to talk.

At least, not here.

But the moment she took the weapon off Bessonov, his goons would draw down on her.

‘Up!’ she ordered, reinforcing the directive with another jab of the gun’s barrel.

‘If you walk away now, I’ll forget this ever happened.’

‘Oh, it’s happening,’ Thompson snarled, ‘and this is the fluffy part. Trust me, it goes downhill from here.’

She grabbed his collar and jerked him upright, then pushed him ahead of her, the gun poised at the nape of his neck while her other hand gripped his shoulder.

Bessonov walked agonisingly slowly, and she got the impression he was stalling.

‘Move it,’ she urged, but Bessonov maintained the sedate pace.

What seemed like an age passed before they finally reached the door. The two goons were seated back in their usual positions, one emotionless while the one with the broken face glared daggers in her direction.

Bessonov stopped at the door.

‘Open it,’ Thompson ordered. ‘Slowly.’

The mobster did as he was told and took a couple of steps outside, before tripping and stumbling to his knees. Thompson realised too late that he’d done it on purpose, and in her haste to get him into her car, she’d forgotten about the third henchman standing guard in the street.

Her gun hand exploded in pain as a ball-bearing-filled cosh crashed down on it, quickly followed by a fierce punch to the temple. Like an outclassed boxer, she felt her legs turn to jelly and collapsed to the ground face first. Her nose took the brunt of the impact, and blood began pouring onto the concrete. A crimson pool began to form as she felt herself being dragged back into the building, and the last thing she saw before she blacked out was Bessonov’s equally bloody face, his dead eyes signalling the terror and pain to come.

‘Easy, now,’ Gray said as he helped Harvey down the narrow wooden staircase.

They’d come across the small farm twenty minutes earlier and he’d sent Sonny ahead to check it out. Fortunately, like many dwellings in this civil-war zone, it had been abandoned for some time, and it hadn’t taken them long to find the cellar. Its door was set into the floor of the barn, and it made the ideal place for Harvey and Howard to wait while the rest of the team went back into Dubrany to rescue McGregor.

At the bottom of the stairs they found a damp floor and very little else. Gray called to Smart and had him throw down a few bales of straw, which would at least give the pair something dry to sit on while they waited for the others to return.

Doc and Sonny appeared at the trapdoor. They’d been outside with bowls to collect some of the falling rain, and had poured their catch into two bottles. Sonny had also brought a couple of old blankets and some dry clothes from the house.

‘We should be back within six hours,’ Gray said to Howard. ‘If we’re not, it’ll be your job to get Andrew across the border to safety. I’m expecting another ruckus at the jail, and that should draw their troops back into town. That’ll be in your favour.’

Gray began to climb the stairs.

‘Tom . . .’

He looked back at Harvey, who cut a pitiful figure as he huddled inside a quilt-work blanket.

‘I just wanna say—’

‘Save it,’ Gray said. ‘We’re not home yet.’ He managed the faintest of smiles. ‘But when we get back to London, you owe us all a few pints.’

‘Deal.’ Harvey tried to return the smile, but only succeeded in cracking open the wounds on his lips. ‘I really need to speak to Ellis. It won’t take long.’

‘The battery on the sat-phone is really low, mate. It’ll have to wait. Just do exactly what Mark says.’ Gray turned to Howard. ‘Get him home, no matter what.’

Speech over, Gray climbed out of the cellar and closed the trapdoor. He helped the others to gather loose straw from around the barn and use it to cover the hatch. Once he was satisfied that it was sufficiently camouflaged, he took a bearing on the GPS and led the others back out into the rain. Sonny picked up a rake on the way out and swept away any sign that they’d been there as they retraced their footsteps from the farm.

They soon reached a small stream, and Sonny hid the rake in some rushes before Gray led them up the riverbed, water lapping up to their knees. It made heavy going, but the important thing was to distance themselves from the farm while minimising the trail back to Harvey.

Night began to give way to a battleship-grey morning, but the rain refused to yield entirely, the earlier bombardment reduced to a steady drizzle.

It wasn’t long before they encountered the enemy.

They were a mile from the outskirts of Dubrany, trekking through a mudbath. Vegetation was scarce, but ahead they saw a treeline and beyond that, the outline of the taller buildings that made up the war-torn town. They first heard, then saw, the BMP-3, its tank tracks making light work of the terrain. It came crashing through a small thicket, upending young trees and trampling bushes.

The vehicle was moving close to its top speed and Gray knew that meant the occupants didn’t expect to find them so close to the town. Thankfully, it was maintaining a steady course that would take it two hundred yards to the right of them, putting it behind them in a couple of minutes.

Gray threw himself into the muck, closely followed by Smart and Sonny. Gray slowly turned on his back, getting a curious stare from Doc.

‘Cover yourself in mud,’ Gray whispered. ‘Camouflage.’

Soon, all four of them blended into their environment. It wasn’t perfect, but there was little else they could do under the circumstances.

And not a moment too soon.

Ahead, Gray saw an open-topped Land Rover approaching, five men on board, and moving on a much closer course to their location. Gray slowly moved his body from side to side, not so quickly as to draw attention to himself, but enough to sink another inch into the sodden ground. His men followed suit, becoming a part of the landscape as best they could.

The last thing Gray wanted to do was have to engage the vehicle, and he was relieved to see it travelling as fast as the armoured BMP-3, the driver keen to get to the border, passengers staring straight ahead.

As soon as the vehicle’s roar had faded into the distance, Gray turned to Sonny.

‘I was right. They’re racing to close the border.’

It was good news, but they weren’t safe yet. There was no telling how many Russian soldiers remained in Dubrany, and now their incursion would occur in broad daylight. Hardly ideal circumstances, but Gray had to play the hand they’d been dealt. Waiting until midnight would have been the preferred strategy, but that would have given the enemy plenty of time to realise they’d fallen for a feint. It would also have meant leaving McGregor in their hands for close on twenty-four hours.